New paperbacks for summer reading

We still can’t travel much these days, but here’s a ray of hope: Your neighborhood bookstore is probably open for curbside service. Order one of these new paperbacks, and let it take you to another place.

“Big Sky” by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown, $16.99). Jackson Brodie is back, investigating a network of sex traffickers in a quiet Yorkshire town. You flit in and out of their various viewpoints, but Brodie’s — warmhearted, haunted by loss — always feels like coming home.

“Ordinary Girls: A Memoir” by Jaquira Diaz (Algonquin, $16.95). Diaz’s debut memoir, winner of the 2020 Whiting Award for nonfiction, tells of growing up in a troubled family in Puerto Rico. “This brutally honest coming-ofage story is a painful yet illuminating memoir, a testament to resilience in the face of scarcity, a broken family, substance abuse, sexual assault, mental illness, suicide and violence. It takes courage to write a book like ‘Ordinary Girls,’ and Diaz does not shy away from her deepest, most troubling truths,” wrote a New York Times reviewer.

“A Pilgrimage to Eternity:

From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith” by Timothy Egan (Penguin, $18; available June 16). Egan writes about revisiting the Christianity he grew up with while walking the 1,000-mile Via Francigena, a medieval pilgrimage route that stretches from England’s Canterbury to Rome. “A moving combination of history and memoir, travelogue and soul-searching, buoyed by Egan’s strengths as a writer: color and humor, a sense of wonder and a gift for getting to the point,” wrote The Seattle Times.